Local and foreign media reuse old Jeddah fire photo in multiple reports
A photograph showing an oil facility belonging to the petroleum and gas company Aramco burning in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, after an attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in 2022 has been used by several Bangladeshi and international news outlets to report on two different incidents over the past six months. The photo has also appeared in an opinion piece about the ongoing war against Iran.
On September 7, a report by Daily Manabkantha, headlined “Saudi Aramco Oil Facility Hit by Fresh, Devastating Attack,” stated, “An oil facility belonging to the state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco in the city of Jizan, Saudi Arabia, has again come under attack. Two people familiar with the matter said the attack occurred on Monday (September 7).” Although the attack took place in Jizan, near the Yemen border, Manabkantha used the photo from the Jeddah incident, which occurred more than four years ago.
On September 8, the verified Facebook page of Daily Manabzamin published a photo card featuring the same headline and image.
The same photo had also been used about a month earlier in reports on a fire at a furniture factory in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed 16 expatriate Bangladeshi workers. On August 9, multiple Bangladeshi news outlets and agencies used this photo of the Aramco fire in their coverage of that incident, including Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS), The Business Standard, Star News, The Financial Express, Bangladesh Pratidin, The Daily Observer, Somoyer Alo, DBC News, RTV, ATN News, Daily Ittefaq, Dhaka Post, Jago News 24, Sarabangla.net, Barta24, Times Today, and Asia Post.
Indian outlet NDTV also used the same photo in its coverage. Its report, published August 10 and headlined “16 Bangladeshi Workers Killed In Fire At Saudi Furniture Factory,” used the Aramco fire photo with the caption, “The fire broke out on Sunday in the Musa Sanaiya industrial area.” Indian outlet The Times of India used the same photo in its reporting on the incident.
Even earlier, on March 12, the opinion section of Daily Prothom Alo published a column headlined “How the War Forced Upon Iran Turned the Tide of Geopolitics.” This piece also used the photo of the Aramco facility in Jeddah, captioned, “The impact of the war against Iran has also been deeply reflected in international markets and the global economy. Photo: Reuters.” In other words, a 2022 photograph was used to illustrate the economic fallout of the ongoing war against Iran—even though, before 2024, there was no direct military conflict between Iran and Israel, only an indirect shadow war. Saudi Arabia is neither mentioned anywhere in the piece nor in the caption.
Running a reverse image search on the photo, Dismislab first traced it to a Reuters report headlined “Saudi Aramco petroleum storage site hit by Houthi attack, fire erupts,” published March 26, 2022. The same photo was also found in an Al Jazeera report published March 25, 2022, headlined “Saudi Aramco’s Jeddah oil depot hit by Houthi attack,” where it was captioned, “Smoke billows from a fire at Saudi Aramco’s petroleum storage facility in Jeddah after the Houthi attack.” The photo was credited to Reuters.
The spread of the fire, the illuminated billboard on the right side, and the position of the cars parked in the front row match exactly across the images used in the recent reports and posts, confirming that they are all the same photograph.
According to the Reuters and Al Jazeera reports, on March 25, 2022, in response to airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition, Yemen’s Houthi rebels launched retaliatory attacks on several cities, including Jeddah, setting this oil facility on fire. Following the attack, Saudi Arabia announced a fresh military operation in Yemen.
Since March this year, the ongoing war against Iran and tensions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz have affected the global economy and oil markets. Amid this, on August 9, Bangladeshi workers were killed in a fire at a furniture factory in Riyadh’s Musa industrial area. Then, on September 7, the Aramco facility in Jizan came under a fresh attack. A Financial Times report stated that a refinery in Jizan with a capacity of 400,000 barrels per day was attacked on Monday—a development also reported by multiple international outlets, including Oilprice.com and Türkiye Today.
Ultimately, news outlets have repeatedly reused the same photograph across different contexts, even though it was originally taken in Jeddah nearly four and a half years ago.
How can old photos be used, or should it be avoided altogether?
Poynter, a nonprofit organization working on journalistic ethics and standards, states in a report on the ethics of using symbolic or “file photos” in news coverage that this practice can become dangerous when the photo used is realistic enough to be mistaken for the actual scene of the incident in question.
Kenny Irby, Poynter’s senior faculty for visual journalism, says publishing a photo without source attribution or a clear label is misleading. Such practices deepen public distrust of the media, which can cause long-term damage to an institution’s credibility and reliability.
He advises that if a news outlet must reuse a photo, it should be clearly labeled as an “illustration” or “file photo” rather than presented as genuine, unaltered evidence of the incident.
